Gardella 16, 17

16   My adventure in China lasted from May 9, 1952 when we were dropped in until May 30 when I was picked up by the submarine--just three weeks.  After three weeks of living so fully it might seem that the rest of my life--twentyeight years of it as I write this--has been dull by comparison.  I think it's more accurate to say that I've lived two lives almost as though I'd been two different people.  My life since I left China has been enough like the lives of most people that a few pages are all I need to tell you about it.   On July 5, 1952 my mother came to visit me at the US Naval Hospital in Annapolis, Maryland.  She found me with my arms & legs bandages & was told that I had been hospitalized because of a severe allergic reaction to poison ivy in the field.  This was of course not true.  What those bandages covered if they covered anything were the various bruises, scrapes & scratches I'd acquired on the other side of the world.   About ten days after that visit I was dismissed from the hospital; after another ten days, on July 24, I was honorably discharged from the Marine Corps.  When my mother met me at South Station in Boston she was clearly upset by the way I looked.  & for a long time my refusal to talk about my experience in the Corps was both a mystery & a source of anxiety to her.   I didn't know what I was going to do with the rest of my life.  I tried reenlisting as a marine & was rejected.  I lived with my parents in allston about a mile from Harvard Stadium & for months I kept to myself, drank alot & worked at odd jobs now & then.  In the spring of 1953 I met Marie who brought me back from the hell my life had become.  I stopped drinking & found steady work.  On November 21 of that year when Marie was still only sixteen & I was one day short of my nineteenth birthday we got married.   In 1955 the year I went into construction work our first daughter, Susan Marie, was born.  Our second, Janet Muriel, arrived three years later.  In 1958 I began moonlighting as a cab driver in Boston, working from five to midnight after an eight-to-four day in construction.  I kept that up for years.  I got my first assignment as a construction foreman in 1960 & by 1963 I was a general foreman--the youngest in our area so far as I know.  Our grandson, Robert Edmund Storme, was born in 1974.   It was in 1977 that I found I had leukemia & decided to put the story of my China mission in writing.  On May 31, 1979 just two weeks after the manuscript was sent to a published I returned home from work to find my wife had been beaten, left bloody & dazed as though she'd been drugged.  Nothing had been taken--none of Marie's jewelry & none of my collection of guns.  The local police kept an eye on her all that summer.  On July 13, 1979 I had the encounter in Harvard Stadium with which this book begins.   Three weeks later, on August 7, our apartment was broken into & ransacked, though once again nothing was taken.  In our bedroom we discovered several peculiar & frightening things.  Marie's coat had been laid on our bed with the stuffing from a pillow inside the hood to suggest the shape of a human head & with the right sleeve folded across the chest.  My pistol had been placed where the hand would have been.  The fabric of the coat had been ripped with a knife.  & in a picture on the wall a circle had been drawn around Marie's head.  Around this time Marie received a number of mysterious telephone calls.  I am as certain as I can be of anything, as I write this, that these incidents add up to deliberate terrorization with the purpose of scaring me out of having my story published.  Just who was responsible of course I do not know.  Now let me go back twentyeight years to just after I left China.   17   On May 30, 1952 before I could finish the American meal I'd been served aboard the submarine I was given a shot that left me drugged.  I woke dazed & groggy.  Again I didn't know where I was.  When I tried to get up I found that I was strapped to the bed across my legs, waist, arms & chest.  As my vision cleared I saw the total whiteness of a hospital room.  to this day I don't know where that room was.  It couldn't have been aboard the sub--the quarters were too spacious for that.  Was I in the naval hospital at Annapolis or somewhere en route?  Hospital rooms everywhere look pretty much alike.  The two figures in white who were present were not the two corpsmen who had given me the shot.   One of them asked how I was feeling.  I said, "I've felt better.  What's going on?"  "Take it easy," he said.  I noticed a pole with a bottle attached & a tube from it leading to my arm.  never having seen such an apparatus before I asked what the hell it was.  The corpsman explained that I was being fed intravenously because I'd been sick & in shock.  then the second corpsman asked me a question:  "How about the others?"  I looked at him.  "What others?"  "Don't play games," he said disagreeably.  "The others in your group."  I answered, "I'm not playing games.  Find out for yourself."   While the men looked at each other I began to wonder whether they were docts at all.  One of them came toward me with a syringe & injected something into the tube leading to my arm.  I remember that a kind of whistling went through my head; after that I lost track of things again.  Other things were happening as I drifted in & out of consciousness.  Once I awoke & heard voices through a slightly opened door.  "How are they going to list the others?"  "Missing in action."  "The poor son of a bitch in there," the first voice said, "he should get a medal.  Instead he'll get nothing but a hard time."  "You think it's all true?"  "After what we've been giving him it's got to be.  It's a wonder he's even alive."  "That's for sure."  "The letter we found on him is probably what did it."  "Yeah, the blackmailing son of a bitch!"  I managed a hoarse yell, "They're not missing in action, they're dead!  They're dead, you bastards!"  The two men came in & I heard one of them mutter.  Then I went under again.   I remember another time seeing three men standing over me while I tried to bring my eyes into focus & hearing one of them ask how I felt.  "A little bit groggy," I told them, "but okay."  "You've been through alot," the same voice said, "can you hear me, can you understand me?"  I said, "Yeah."  "We want to send you somewhere, somewhere in Asia."  I said, "Yeah, where?"  "Indochina"  "So I can be missing in action?"  & they put me under again.   Then I remember waking in another hospital room.  This time I wasn't strapped down.  The sheets were crisp & smooth & I was dressed in pajamas.  I had a radio by my bed & there were flowers on the window sill.  I swung my legs over the side of the bed & tried to sit up.  Immediately I felt dizzy & my head began throbbing.  A second later the door opened & two civilians came in.  One of them spoke softly.  "You'd better get dressed.  There's someone upstairs waiting to see you."  He pointed to a corner of the room where a set of marine tropicals was hanging.   I stood up slowly & carefully & managed to get into the uniform while the two men watched.  I felt like an old man--weak & stiff & tired.  The corridor into which I followed the two men was thronged with people in white.  At least I really was in a hospital this time.  We got onto an elevator & when its door opened we walked through a doorway & into a room with the shades drawn, with almost no light coming through.  As my eyes became adjusted to the dark I saw that several people were waiting.  A voice came for the far end of the room:  "Son--"  Someone interrupted.  "John, leave this to me.  Those _____ have gotten us into this.  Now let's see if I can get us out of it."  The voice was snappy & somehow it struck me as familiar.  "Son, we are...awfully sorry for what happened.  Awfully sorry.  May God help us all."  The voice paused again as though saying a prayer.  "We know everything now, son; I didn't know before; I'm sorry I didn't."  "Didn't know?" I asked.  "Who didn't--"  One of the others said, "Keep your voice down.  Do you know who--"   The snappy voice with the familiar twang intervened again.  "John, I told you to keep quiet!"  Then more calmly, "Son, there's nothing yu or I can do about it now.  It's too late.  If you talk about what happened, what you did, you could start a war.  You've got to keep your mouth shut."  As my eyes grew more accustomed to the semidarkness I could see that the figure was short & blocky & wore a square-cut, double-breasted jacket.  As he moved even in the dim light there was the tiny glint of a reflection from his glasses.  The voice softened.  "You deserve alot but this country can't give it to you.  It can't give you any medals because all of this is going to be forgotten.  None of it will be  in the records.  None of it will have happened.  I'm not asking you to forgive me, I'm asking you to forgive our country.  I found out about all this only by the grace of god.  But I can make you a promise.  This happened; it won't happen again; that's my promise.  You have to make one in return."  "Yes, sir?"     "You must remain silent; tell no one; I'm asking you to promise that for your country."  "Yes sir, I promise," I said.  Then I asked, "Sir, what happens to me now?"  "You will be discharged for medical reasons.  I understand you have a history of asthma."  "Sir, I have a favor to ask you," I began.  Though what I really wanted to ask was to get back into the marines, I also knew there was no point in asking for that.  So I said, "When I was picked up I had on a set of rosary beads.  They were very special.  I'd like to have them back."  "John--" the short man said.  He didn't have to say any more.  He sounded very much the boss.  The man who had left the room was soon back.  He handed something to the short man who now walked toward me.  The rosary beads were in his hand.  I took them & thanked him.   Then one of the others drew up a shade & there was no longer any doubt in my mind about who the speaker was.  "Son," he said, "I'd like to shake your hand."  The hand he held out was small but strong.  Before I let it go I asked, "Sir, where am I & what day is it?"  "This is the US Naval Hospital at Annapolis, Maryland & it is June 28, 1952."  Then abruptly President Harry S. Truman released my hand, wheeled about & walked smartly out of the room with the others close behind him.  Two weeks later I walked out the hospital with the rosary beads in my hand.   Epilogue   Not all the questions you must have about the story I have told can be answered.  For some of them the reason is simply that I don't know the answer.  For others, to give it would endanger the lives of others.  But there are a few things that I can at least try to clear up though they will raise further questions.   Why did I go back on the promise I made never to tell the story?  There are several reasons.  One is that it was an old promise & the world has changed.  I believe my experience has something to say to policymakers.  & I now know that the government never really kept the promise that was made to that seventeen year old kid.  My illness, my wife, my priest--all of them gave me the same message:  that it was right to tell the truth about what I knew regardless of how awful it might seem.   Where was President Truman on June 28, 1952?  Could he have been talking to me in the hospital that day?  A journalist who checked his schedule for that day found that he was in Washington & that no appointments were listed on his calendar.  Annapolis, Maryland is thirtyfive miles from Washington, no more than an hour's drive away.   What do Marine Corps records say about me & the special force?  That I never left the States, that the medical records of my stay in the naval hospital were destroyed by fire, & that there are no records that any of the men with me--Damon, Masters, Holden, White or Craig--was ever in the Corps.     What happened to my friends in China?  I'm happy to be able to say that as of the time I write this, Gunny, Charlie, Kim & the Mongol lieutenant are alive & well.  Audy is also alive but has never really recovered from the wounds he suffered when we rescued the children from the village near Kenyu.  Nancy & Scotty are dead.  Nancy was killed in a battle in 1954.  Scotty, after surviving forty years of combat, died of natural causes in 1977.     God only know where John O'Malley is.  I've also learned the Dragon Lady is alive & has twin sons--our sons.  They are big & blond & as of the time I write this they are twentyseven years old.  Some day before I die I am going to see them.  May God give me strength whatever happens.                                                 ***